Major providers of commercial services such as telephone subscribers of toll-free 800 telephone services, airline reservation services, and other similar commercial services, spend much money catering to the world traveller. This is especially true with telephone subscribers of various telephone services as well as the telephone network providers themselves. It is difficult to advertise these services overseas. Often sales people must travel overseas to contact foreign nationals, or advertise directly in overseas newspapers and television commercials. This major "sales" effort is done to "catch" the international market, especially the world traveler.
Besides the use of an international sales force, some domestic United States telephone providers have proposed placing their technology overseas. This is sometimes difficult, however. Often there is a problem with a foreign country's right-to-use such technology since it may compete with the foreign country's national telephone service. Also, some of the technology must be certified and meet stringent customs duties.
This void in advertising to the international world traveler has been met to a certain degree by placing technologically advanced telephone stations, such as the AT&T Public Phone 2000, in airport terminals and other places such as hotels where these travelers tend to stay. These phones not only provide the standard transmitter and receiver for making local and international phone calls but also these phones have a color monitor which displays images such as a company logo for eight to ten seconds, or displays information in a selected language on how to use the phone. The Public Phone 2000 has a microprocessor contained in the phone station which controls the color monitor and allows other advanced telephone functions, thus catering to the international world traveler.
It would be desirable to use an existing phone having a display monitor to play selected still or video images, such as vendor and subscriber selected advertisements to the world traveller. It would also be desirable to selectively control these images depending on the location of the phone, i.e., the terminal, the time of incoming flights, their origin, and other factors. For example, a local telephone station positioned at an airport terminal may have travelers of different national origin visiting the area where that phone is located depending on what incoming flight has arrived to that terminal. Thus, the displayed advertisements on the monitor should change depending on these different parameters.
In some terminals, the local telephone stations are grouped closely adjacent to each other. Thus, it would be desirable to have different video images transmitted to different telephone stations so as to attract travelers of different nationalities toward the monitors. This would require even greater control and possibly multiplexing capabilities of the images from a central image database.
A major drawback of this desired system, however, is the use of the existing telephone line system. Video images have great bandwidth. Thus, transmission of video images over existing telephone network lines is difficult. One solution would be to place new cables used for image transmission from an image database to the local telephone. However, placing additional lines used only for carrying video images to a phone, such as a Public Phone 2000, in an airport terminal may be prohibitively expensive considering what the advertising could actually produce in generated revenue from the world traveler.